Fourth Reich Archaeology

Fourth Reich Archaeology

Do you ever feel like life in the United States doesn’t make any sense? Is the daily barrage of hypocrisy and lies you’re being fed getting to you? Do you feel sick, agitated, or anxious, and don’t know why? Join your hosts Dick and Don as they excavate the contemporary capitalist hellscape in which we find ourselves in search of the cause of our collective malaise. Follow along as we dig deep into historical persons, places, and events to expose what’s been concealed, and reveal the US-led global order for what it truly is: the Fourth Reich.

  1. #083 - Mafiocracy w/ Moe Tkacik (Side B)

    1 DAY AGO

    #083 - Mafiocracy w/ Moe Tkacik (Side B)

    First things first: ¡Viva Cuba! Y viva la revolución y el pueblo cubano. ¡Hasta la victoria siempre! Down with the demonic imperialism of the yankqui vampire.  Amidst the emergency conditions of the American strangulation of the Cuban people, we begin this episode with a discussion of the Trump administration’s criminal aggression against the island and its revolution. We cover the King of Crime’s recent executive order premised on the absurd notion that Cuba poses a threat to the national security of the United States. Every accusation is an admission, as they say. The latest Trump/Rubio gambit to lay siege to the island is collective punishment for the crime of daring to exercise sovereignty. All eyes on Cuba, break the blockade. From that intro, we zoom out from the present moment with the second half of Don’s discussion with the great journalist Moe Tkacik of the American Prospect, who has brought a much-needed historical materialist perspective to coverage of the government and the laundry-list of crimes that the most powerful people therein are responsible for.  We pick up where we left off with the mobbed-up background and low-down gangster tactics of “Little Narco” Marco Rubio, and examine how his backstory intersects with the OG mafia-state collaborations in the form of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy assassination, and the Iran-Contra drugs for weapons rackets.  In this second part of the discussion, we dig even deeper and explore the Nazi roots of the Mafiocracy and trace the unbroken continuity of mob-state relations in the postwar era. As long as a so-called “democracy” like the U.S. needs to maintain the spectacle of legitimacy, it needs to carry out its dirtiest work off the books and out of sight. That was the case with the Nazi/ClA Gehlen Org, it was the case with the anti-Castro Cubans employed as state terrorists and assassins, and it remains the case today in the Time for Crime in which we live.  Music: Songs of Carlos Puebla. Moe’s Article: The Narco-Terrorist Elite (https://prospect.org/2025/12/23/narco-terrorist-elite-rubio-south-america-iran-contra/) Fourth Reich Archaeology Patreon: patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

    1h 39m
  2. #082 - Fourth Reich Political Theology, Part 2 - Side A

    6 FEB

    #082 - Fourth Reich Political Theology, Part 2 - Side A

    We are back with another installment of our ongoing series Fourth Reich Political Theology with Marcus from the Return of the Repressed podcast. Recall that in our opening salvo of this series, we laid the foundation for our excavation by exploring how the superstitious religious worldview of the feudal world order was superimposed onto the capitalist world order with “The Market” playing the role of God. The same way that serfs and peasants lived their lives in awe and default belief of a vengeful deity, we today implicitly believe in the mysterious market forces we are told move the earthly cosmos beyond the will of man. This episode picks up right where we left off, expanding outwards on what we covered in part 1 to reach beyond the “earthly philosophers” of bourgeois political economy (Smith, Bentham, et al.), to the German Idealists from Kant to the so-called neo-Kantains, to the early sociologists, to the man of the hour himself, Carl Schmitt. In our journey, we draw heavily on Georg Lukacs “The Destruction of Reason” to trace the thread of irrationalism through all liberal political philosophizing.  Lukacs and Schmitt see eye to eye when it comes to the hypocrisy and incoherence of Western bourgeois liberal democracy. After all, rule of by and for the bourgeoisie–and the exploitation and domination of the proletariat that entails–cannot really pursue the objectives of liberté, egalité, and fraternité. That would destroy the special privileges enjoyed by the ruling class. But from the same observation, Schmitt and Lukacs proceed in polar opposite directions. Schmitt would strip back the pretense of institutional norms in favor of the rule of raw power, which he supported in his advocacy for and membership in the Nazi party. Lukacs, good Marxist that he was, would instead expose the exploitive nature of the state and the society and, developing class consciousness through praxis, expropriate the ruling class in favor of the dictatorship of the proletariat.  It’s another incredible conversation with Marcus, and one that has real practical implications for today when we once again find ourselves in what Schmitt called “the state of exception” where the sovereign alone makes the rules… Return of the Repressed Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/TheReturnOfTheRepressed Fourth Reich Archaeology Patreon: patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

    1h 49m
  3. #081 - Mafiocracy w/ Moe Tkacik (Side A)

    30 JAN

    #081 - Mafiocracy w/ Moe Tkacik (Side A)

    This week we have yet another guest with whom to zoom out from the present moment and excavate critical contextual information and insights. This week’s guest is the great journalist Moe Tkacik of the American Prospect, who has brought a much-needed historical materialist perspective to coverage of the government and the laundry-list of crimes that the most powerful people therein are responsible for. Particularly, we dig into the mobbed-up background and low-down gangster tactics of “Little Narco” Marco Rubio. Moe walks us through the ways in which Rubio tanked a proposed prisoner exchange with Venezuela in order to fan the flames of war and pave the way to the regime-change operation he eventually spearheaded. She also discusses her deep research into his background and how it intersects with the OG mafia-state collaborations in the form of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy assassination, and the Iran-Contra drugs for weapons rackets.  We talk a lot on this podcast about the King of Crime, Donald Trump, but as the great bit-character Ciccio testifies before the fictionalized U.S. Senate in the Godfather Part II, “the family’s got a lot of buffers.” And an ambitious up-and-comer like Rubio makes a phenomenal buffer. In the second part of the discussion - currently only available on Patreon - we dig even deeper and explore the Nazi roots of the Mafiocracy and trace the unbroken continuity of mob-state relations in the postwar era.  Music: Songs of Carlos Puebla and Zach de la Rocha feat. Last Emperor and KRS-ONE. Moe’s Article: The Narco-Terrorist Elite (https://prospect.org/2025/12/23/narco-terrorist-elite-rubio-south-america-iran-contra/) Fourth Reich Archaeology Patreon: patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

    1h 22m
  4. #080 - Bracing for Revolution w/ Brace Belden

    23 JAN

    #080 - Bracing for Revolution w/ Brace Belden

    This week we are joined by a special guest, TrueAnon’s Brace Belden, to take stock of the current and impending crisis and brainstorm ways that we might think creatively to meet the moment and face off against an admittedly much better organized fascist enemy. For those of us on the left seeking to exploit the next crisis to push back against the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of our craven overlords, we must come to grips with the fact that there currently is no organized revolutionary movement; there’s not even a revolutionary working class. But that does not mean that we should give into fatalism. There are plenty signs of hope, and the demand for a unified front against fascism is higher than it has been in generations. We discuss all of this and much more with Brace, including the magnetic pull of the spectacle towards compatible leftism, the prospects for armed struggle (including insights from Brace’s time in Syria), and how we can learn from the past without using history as a costume for revolutionary LARPing. We don’t have the answers, but we do have the will, and we hope you’ll tune in and join us. Links:  https://podcast.trueanon.com/ Brace’s Baffler Article, “The Hatred of Podcasting” https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/the-hatred-of-podcasting-belden Lukacs “History and Class Consciousness” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/Herbert Marcuse’s 1969 Berkeley Speech with Angela Davis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuyWj8BtjKc Fourth Reich Archaeology Patreon: Patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

    1h 52m
  5. #077 - Emergency Dispatch - Illegal Business

    7 JAN

    #077 - Emergency Dispatch - Illegal Business

    This week we are dropping our episode early because there is just too much going on for us to sit on the sidelines until Friday.  Recorded on Sunday, January 4th, 2026, in this episode we weigh in on the outright violation of international law that occurred in the dead of night on Saturday, January 3rd in Caracas, Venezuela, when Nicolas Maduro and his wife were kidnapped by the United States Military Industrial Complex and brought to the center of empire to answer to federal charges of narcoterrorism.  Even though we (and the rest of the world) knew this was a long time coming - and we predicted it in our Geopolitik 7 episode - the actual event was still a shock when it happened. Whatever happens next, this invasion marks the entry into a new era of U.S. world policing, one in which the United States will straight up go out and bag any head of state it dislikes, under cover of darkness, in order to get what it wants.  This is a violation of international law. It is a violation of domestic law. And beyond strongly worded letters and statements, the international community seems to be okay with letting it go unanswered.  At least for now, it seems like the United States’ policy of “might makes right” is going to carry the day.  Meanwhile, the U.S. mafia-state under the helm of King of K-K-Krime Donald Trump is wearing its criminality like a mink coat. U.S. friendly drug dealers like the recently pardoned ex-Honduran kingpin/president Juan Orlando Hernandez, Ecuadoran billionaire/president Daniel Noboa, and crypto fraudster/torture-dungeon-master Nayib Bukele laugh their way to the bank. The empire’s reasons for flouting the law are beyond transparent, they are blatant and brazen. Under the laughable pretext of curbing drug trafficking into the United States, the Trump administration has openly asserted that the reason they took Maduro was to open up the Venezuelan oil and mineral market to multinational corporations.  It’s all so basic. It’s all so annoying. We have come back to the 19th Century policy of going out and taking control over places and peoples simply so that we can extract their resources to enrich our psychotic rulers. And at this point, the default is that the billionaire class, the powers that be, and whatever hangers on who worship that group are just going to keep doing mafia shit to consolidate capital as long as everyone else goes along with the shakedown racket. Let’s get digging.

    1h 51m

About

Do you ever feel like life in the United States doesn’t make any sense? Is the daily barrage of hypocrisy and lies you’re being fed getting to you? Do you feel sick, agitated, or anxious, and don’t know why? Join your hosts Dick and Don as they excavate the contemporary capitalist hellscape in which we find ourselves in search of the cause of our collective malaise. Follow along as we dig deep into historical persons, places, and events to expose what’s been concealed, and reveal the US-led global order for what it truly is: the Fourth Reich.

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